As rumors continue regarding Intel's possible decision to move the Pentium III line of CPUs over to their less costly and more efficient Socket370 architecture design later in the year, the P3-550 CPU will be available at the time of its launch (May 17th) in the standard Slot-1 configuration only.

It's possible that with the adoption of the 133MHz 820 mainboard chipset that Coppermine CPUs could debut in Socket370 variants, although that information is speculative at best.

Like its 450 and 500MHz stablemates, the new P3-550 requires a 100MHz front side bus speed and 440BX core logic AGPset when equipped on a standard mainboard. Unlike the previous two P3s, the P3-550 carries a fixed 5.5x clock multiplier (5.5 x 100MHz) whereas the P3-450 carried a 4.5x multiplier and the P3-500 carried a 5.0x multiplier.

As with all of the Pentium III CPUs, the new P3-550 comes equipped with the now infamous SSE floating point optimization instructions, a fact that became clear as we tested the new part against a host of other Intel CPUs.

SSE is just beginning to show exactly how impactful it can be in real world situations, we believe it will be indispensable when running state of the art apps and entertainment titles at high performance levels later in the year.